


Reprise

by HannahLydia



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Memory Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:48:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23492737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HannahLydia/pseuds/HannahLydia
Summary: An over-worked Handsome Jack dreams of Angel."... micro-naps were never usually enough for him to dream. Not until now. This time, when his eyes drifted shut against a sea of spreadsheets and ECHOmails, he slipped completely from reality, slumping into sleep as surely as if he were plunging into deep, deep water. By the time he resurfaced, he found himself face-to-face with his daughter."
Relationships: Angel & Handsome Jack (Borderlands)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	Reprise

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot started off life as an angsty solo post for my Handsome Jack rp account. It was originally supposed to be short enough to reasonably post to Twitter but I guess it-- kinda got away from me.  
> I'm also debating whether or not to recycle this later into a much, much larger fanfic but we will have to see for now~ I nevertheless hope you enjoy the angst! 
> 
> PS: Major spoilers for the 'Childhood's End' quest from BL3.

Being a CEO of a major corporation comes with its fair share of drawbacks and sacrifices. Jack had often concluded that in order to succeed you have to become something other than human - forcing yourself to evolve through any means necessary with the use of whatever hit helps. That might be valium to help you sleep at night, strong alcohol to keep the ghosts of your choices at bay, or enough amphetamines to keep productivity at its peak. It's easy to fall into the sex, drugs and rock an' roll lifestyle. It's even easier to become someone else; to give in to the cut-throat, apathetic machine that knows how to turn a profit at the expense of all else.  
Each step on the ladder is a trade or an alchemical ritual, one in which you offer a part of yourself in exchange for wealth, renown and success. Jack had long ago handed over almost every piece of the peppy code-monkey he used to be, and had long been up-to-his-eyeballs in stimulants to forget what else he had traded along the way. 

While Jack favoured multiple methods to prevent inward reflection and keep him powering on, he wasn’t _always_ the best at remembering to administer them. On rare occasions, he could work hard enough to forget to take his usual hit of uppers, and burnout and exhaustion would inevitably follow. His PAs had been known to find him asleep at his desk, sunk back in his chair or propped up by his own hand. Sometimes it would be for mere seconds, sometimes minutes... but micro-naps were never usually enough for him to dream. Not until now. This time, when his eyes drifted shut against a sea of spreadsheets and ECHOmails, he slipped completely from reality, slumping into sleep as surely as if he were plunging into deep, deep water. By the time he resurfaced, he found himself face-to-face with his daughter.

Jack was only vaguely aware that he was dreaming at first. The fact that he was no longer situated in his office and that he couldn't move should have been a dead giveaway, but his mind came around slowly, too busy registering where and when he was. Summoned back to the very last place he wanted to revisit, Jack soon learned that he was rooted to the spot.   
His mind resisted any attempts of his to change the scenery, leaving him stuck with an arid desert, a barricade of turrets, his late daughter and the first bandit he'd ever had the misfortune of running into. Even in sleep his stomach began knotting up, attempting to fend off creeping dread as his hands curled into fists at his sides.   
This was the very place that had given birth to the cynicism and scathing psychopathy within him; somewhere he hadn't been since he was a fresh-faced, twenty-something-year-old. It was a memory he desperately tried to bury beneath ego, whisky and dopamine injections and yet here it was, a brazen re-enactment with all the contents muddled.

Here, Angel was not the frightened, hysterical child that she should have been, begging to go home with wide, wet eyes, but a young woman on the cusp of her twenties. She was paler than he could ever remember her being, with violet lips and bruised rings around glazed-over eyes. Although she seemed to be completely passive and merely propped up by the bandit that held her at gunpoint, her gaze regarded him in open accusation. She was something dead being dressed up as something living, with all the fight removed except for the defiant spark in those haunting, icy blue eyes. 

"Look, you-- _filthy_ _bandit_. Just... give me back my daughter. Okay??" The words were in the air before Jack could even consider where they’d come from. While he could recognise that the voice was his own, it had been seemingly projected out from within him rather than woven from his own tongue. He was merely a conduit; a speaker replaying an old audio file for context, only with the subtlest of changes. " _My_ " daughter. Not "our". Some things were too painful and too deeply repressed, even for a nightmare.

It was then that Jack realised that his arms were now extended - at some point his fisted hands had given in to the instinctive need to reach for Angel, as if he could negotiate her rescue with gestures alone. He thought that if he could just reach her - if he could just pull her from the bastard's arms and towards him to safety - then he'd be able to pull her back into reality along with him. Reinstate her as she was when he lost her, and wipe away the painful allegation that resided in her eyes.

This was the bandit’s cue of course - to mock him and repeat the history Jack knew all too well - except Grogmouth didn’t follow the playbook. He pressed the barrel of the gun tighter to Angel's temple, hard enough to doubt what should have been a bluff on his part, and forced her to her knees. Angel slumped like a rag doll, but all the while her burning gaze remained locked with his. There was no hatred there, or even reproach; she was merely condemning Jack with her eyes, asking a question he had no answer to.  
He wished she wasn’t so frustratingly calm. If she had been screaming or begging then the situation might have made him feel at least a little more comfortable. By doing so it would’ve been familiar and therefore traumatic territory, yes, but it would have been _solid ground._ He could have dominion in a space where he had the chance to be a hero, to protect her and make this better. Right now, Angel seemed to be accepting of the fact that she was being physically threatened, as if she had resigned herself to it, and the rising panic was beginning to tip Jack closer and closer to the edge. 

"I don't want to go with you, Jack," Angel said finally, in a voice that sounded both disembodied and faraway. The first time she had ever called him by name had been a slap to the face, but he had become so used to it now that the sting was minimal. What _hurt_ was the fact that she was in danger, and she was refusing his help. 

"Naw, baby," For the first time in his life, Jack hated how he sounded. His tone was as flippant and patronising as ever, trivialising the issue, and yet the uneven laughter that spilled into his words gave away his underlying nerves. "You don't-- You don't mean that," After all, she _couldn't_ mean that - it was _absurd_ ! Didn't she see what was happening here? What was at stake?   
He took a step forward, and one of the bandit's turrets swivelled to face him, assessing him the way a guard dog eyes an approaching threat. 

Angel’s clouded eyes now took on a sombre look, her eyebrows slanting above them sadly. Her hands had fallen uselessly into her lap but otherwise resembled a martyr’s prayer moments before execution. "I’ve never been more serious about anything,” She told him, sounding so much braver than she looked. She’d always had a way of projecting a second identity, someone that was maturer and wiser than her years, bolstered by the almost-omniscient outlook that her siren powers had granted her. She may have sounded like the ‘guardian angel’ persona she’d perfected but her expression was that of a girl - _his_ little girl - at the end of her thread. “Look at me. Look at what happened to _us_ . You _need_ to let me go," 

Jack’s panic exploded into something feral; the anger burning white-hot. _This_ was why he’d needed to protect her - not just from others, but from herself. She was too young to be making such ruthless decisions at her own expense. Worse still, she was humiliating him in front of the bandit that was all-too-willing to sacrifice her for his own means; someone who _wanted_ to do her real harm. 

"Don't-- test me, Angel,” Jack snapped, his admonishing tone more threatening than it was fatherly. Then, within seconds his expression was softening, trying everything - anything - to win her round. “Just-- let me bring you home. I'll fix this, I _swear_. I'm beggin' you, baby!"

"... dad?"

His heart almost skipped a beat. Suddenly Jack forgot how to exert control through force of will alone; her voice was appealing to something deeper within him, derailing his train of thought. The sandy backdrop of the badlands was fading, as was the threat of Grogmouth and his slew of turrets. Soon, all that remained was Angel and the dark void in which they were now in.   
A father and his daughter. 

Jack released a breath as if he’d been holding it; palpable even in sleep. "Yes, baby?" 

Angel teetered on her knees. Without the bandit there to hold her up she listed to the right, and then gravity won out until she had fallen completely onto her side.   
A muscle in Jack’s leg jumped and he dashed to close the short distance between them.  
It was then that the darkness around them began to ease, haphazard beams of light slowly spotlighting the control core she had once been locked away in. 

As Jack scooped her up in his arms, Angel felt so frail to the touch. Not emaciated - he had always ensured she was fed and nourished - but this was a different kind of fragility, like she was made of glass. It was almost as if she had been entirely exsanguinated, and she had instead been pumped full of the liquid eridium that had been sustaining her so that her skin had turned to porcelain and her muscles had wasted away to nothing. 

Jack was about to prompt her, shake her, when her eyes found his once more. The melancholy was still there, but so was the accusation. She was tired, he could see that now, and it hurt just how much she looked like her mother. 

"... There’s nothing you can do to fix this,”

The words hit harder than any bullet. They wounded, maimed, and needled at every single one of his insecurities. Jack could only stare at her, pupils subtly shifting as he examined her face for any traces of a lie there. If she had just opened Pandora’s box, there _had_ to be a shred of hope. He could fix this, he could fix _anything_. He had the money to invest and the command of multiple scientists at the top of their fields - if anyone could find a way to bring her back and make everything ok again, he could. And yet... of everything that was broken, that wasn’t it. There are some things, intangible things, that can never be fixed, and he was just too vain or too naive to see it.

As if reading his mind, Angel’s head shook just as the corners of her lips curled up in a wry smile. The image of her mother was gone, and the face he was now staring into was very much akin to his. It was the face of someone who had _won.  
_“You can’t see it, can you?” 

“Angel--” 

“I’m finally-- _finally_ free of you,” 

Jack balked. His fingertips dug into her flesh, hard enough that had she been truly in his arms they’d have bruised. Gritting his teeth, he made to shake her, to snarl at her, to _dare_ her to speak to him that way again, but she’d become an unresponsive dead-weight in his arms.   
The pale light that had been granting life to otherwise empty eyes was now evanescent, but the satisfaction remained on her face even as she began to turn to ashes in his grip. He soon lost the sensation of being able to _feel_ her at all as he crept ever closer to waking, but the pain was something unbearably raw, careening out of all control.

“Angel,” Her name had become something ragged, tearing its way from his throat. “ _Angel_. Baby, no. No-nahnonono, Angel-- ANGEL!” The more he tried to clutch at her, the more she disintegrated. It wasn’t long before she collapsed all together into a thin cloud of dust, filtering through his fingers, and Jack started screaming like he would never stop. 

By the time he woke, he had been clutching his desk for so long that his clawed hands had turned white with the strain.  
Wet through with perspiration and breathing like he had just run a marathon, Jack’s rage consumed him until the world around him was nothing but a blurry, red mist set to the tune of static. 

With a furious yell, he grabbed the first thing to hand and volleyed it at the large monitor suspended from the ceiling. He watched as the object sailed through the air before it collided with the screen, fracturing it and causing a shower of glass. 

As he heaved for every breath, Jack was overly conscious of the layer of sweat that had formed between his skin and his mask. He was suddenly claustrophobic, as if he couldn’t suck in air without sucking in the cold, salty damp, and so began angrily fumbling with the hinged clips at his forehead. The ball of his palm connected hard with his chin in a bit to unclasp himself quickly, and he ripped the mask free only to inhale like a half-drowned man.   
He was soon kneading the bridge of his nose, shoulders high, trying to quiet the roaring of his own blood in his ears. 

Finally, when his pulse was no longer beating its own war drum and his head had begun to clear, he pulled himself to his feet. Though his nerves were shot, he was lucid enough to inspect what it was he had just thrown in anger. 

Stepping out from around his desk, he glanced up at the thousand-dollar screen he had just destroyed. His monitor was now stuck on the last email he’d had open, the display crackling and jarring with bars scrolling across it in an endless loop. Even so, it was never quite enough to hide the subject title - it was visible even through the web of shattered glass. 

[CLASSIFIED: PHOENIX PROJECT 2.0]

And there, on the floor, lying face-down in amongst a halo of clear shards, was a frame. 

Jack stared at it at first as if he could will it away; wish that he had thrown _any_ object but that. The ugly truth, however, was that he only had one memento on his desk - only one projectile at his disposal - and in his all-consuming temper it had lost all meaning.   
He slowly bent down to pick up the photograph, shaking free any excess glass that hadn’t already been dislodged in its fall. Angel’s beaming face stared back at him, harkening back to a time when nothing else had mattered except crayons, Captain Bear, belly raspberries and bedtime stories. 

Carrying the photo-frame back towards his desk, Jack was soon absent-mindedly dialling his PA to charge them with bringing in maintenance and housekeeping. His voice was acidic, devoid of his usual energy and charm. Propping his daughter’s photograph back up on the surface of his desk, he stared at it until janitorial arrived to sweep up the mess.   
Jack swivelled his chair around as soon as he had company, hiding his ravaged, mask-less face from view. He instead turned his attention to the panoramic scenery that filled the floor-to-ceiling windows at this end of his office, hoping for something - anything - to distract him from--

_(‘Dad?’)_

No good. The voice may have been in his mind but it was loud - so loud that it could have been spoken directly into his ear.   
Jack closed his eyes against the memory and pressed his fingers into his left temple hard enough to hurt. His other hand cupped the control panel embedded in the armrest of his chair, the tips of his fingers blindly navigating the buttons until the contact-activated injectors switched from administering dopamine to sedatives. 

Relief quickly flooded through his body, easing the ache as if it had been physical and rendering his daughter’s ghost silent. He didn’t know how long he sat there, waiting until any traces of grief and remorse had been numbed entirely by the drugs pumping through his system. 

By the time he felt composed enough to reapply his mask and retire for the night he had once again become something barely human; cognisant but stoic. 

Each step on the ladder of success was an exchange, yes… but not all trades were proportionate or fair.


End file.
